Ripples
by Perosha
Summary: She knew better than to start caring about him; that was obviously a terrible idea. But even the best-laid plans… / Anime-inspired ShiverMeTimbersshipping (Shelly/Archie) fluff.


As usual, Shelly was the only one who didn't drink. Even after being an admin this long, she still wasn't comfortable letting her guard down that way, and supposed she never would be; she bristled at the possibility of her tongue perhaps loosening too much. But she always participated anyway, as these nighttime excursions had been an informal routine of Archie and Matt's long before Shelly had joined their ranks. Unwinding for one evening every week or two, hauling folding chairs and a case of beer up the escape hatch to sit on the roof of the disguised base, counting the stars, watching the lights of the ships that crept into Lilycove atop the black velvet sea. They talked and drank—sang a little, even, if Matt felt in the mood to pluck a tune—but Shelly never touched a drop. Tonight she'd been particularly wise to abstain. Whatever had been in that bottle Matt had confiscated from the grunts had been even stronger than it smelled.

Shelly was the last down the ladder, and paused before reaching the bottom, watching Matt bid farewell and carry the folding chairs down the narrow metal corridor back towards the storerooms, humming loudly enough that he could still be heard once he'd vanished from sight. Archie hummed the same few bars, though much more roughly; unlike Matt, he had no sense of tune, though that never stopped him after he'd had a drink. Shelly stepped off the next-to-last rung of the ladder.

"Sir?"

Archie took a second to stop humming, and to notice her. Shelly forced down a wry smile at his expression; his gaze was more unfocused than usual, his grin sloppy.

"Heheh...Good song, eh?"

But the next verse of it ended abruptly when he stepped forward and lurched, stumbling, throwing out a hand to grab the wall and lean against it for support. Instinctively Shelly lunged and caught him, staggering under his sudden weight for a split second before finding her footing and throwing his arm over her shoulder, steadying him on his feet, straightening up.

"Be careful, sir."

Archie laughed, quite unbothered by his sudden loss of control. This close she could smell on his breath whatever he and Matt had been drinking—some homemade cousin of rum, perhaps. There was a hint of sweetness to it.

"M' fine." His words stuck together, slurred. "Leggo..."

Shelly weighed her options, deciding after a moment that although watching him fall down repeatedly on the way to his quarters would be entertaining, he wouldn't learn a lesson from it, and might even hurt himself. She adjusted her grip on the arm over her shoulder, staring down the dimly-lit corridor and calculating the distance.

"'Mm off to bed," Archie announced, starting forward. Shelly followed along, and when he tried to tug his arm away from her, she didn't let him, garnering a halfhearted complaint that she couldn't understand.

The two of them made their way down the corridor with measured steps, Shelly thankful that none of the grunts had any reason to be up here at this hour. Though (she hoisted his arm higher against her shoulder), she suspected that even if someone spotted them, she would be much more bothered by it than Archie. Archie would laugh the incident off, in the moment and in the morning; Shelly would find that less easy. It wasn't that she wasn't confident in her authority—far from it—she simply had a certain image she liked to maintain among the troops. And shepherding their fearless leader to his room after one round too many was not in her job description.

"Lemme go, Shelly..."

Shelly chose not to reply, as there would be no point arguing with him in this state; instead she kept going, nudging him when he tried to halt in protest, their combined footsteps echoing down the metal corridor. Archie kept up a contented stream of nonsense, enlivened by his harsh laugh, once or twice reaching out with his free hand to drag his fingertips across the wall for a few feet. Shelly suppressed a smile, trying to ignore him—with the result that it caught her by surprise when he buried his face in her thick red hair, nuzzling her. The drinking song came back, or at least a few strains of it, hummed into her hair before being forgotten again; Shelly rolled her eyes, finally letting her smile escape, if only out of one side of her mouth.

"We're almost there, sir."

Realizing this, he halted again; she halted too.

"Yeah. I can make it..."

This time Shelly let him free himself, though she kept a hand on his shoulder long enough for him to steady his balance against the wall. He stumbled onward, dizzy but determined, and when he disappeared into his room at the end of the corridor, Shelly pivoted and headed back the way they'd come, towards the stairwell that would take her down to the level of the base her own room was on. He could manage well enough, surely.

But she only managed to go about a dozen feet before slowing, then halting, as if fighting the pull of a powerful magnet. She looked over her shoulder at the light now spilling from under the doorway to Archie's room, grimacing, thinking it through...and then Shelly sighed, shaking her head at herself, turning to close the distance she'd just covered and stop outside his door. The light trickling from beneath the door did not shift with shadows, nor could she hear any movement inside; after a pause she turned the knob, poking her head cautiously inside.

Archie was fine. In fact he was already asleep, or looked like it: sprawled on his back on the messy bunk, an arm and a leg dangling over the edge, having only had the energy (or the presence of mind) to discard his bandana and pants, which lay crumpled on the floor a few feet away. Evidently it had been too much work to try and pull his shirt off before collapsing.

Shelly hesitated, then stepped inside, leaving the door not-quite-closed behind her to keep it from shutting loudly.

The bunk creaked when she eased herself down to sit on its edge. Archie stirred, and she reassured him it was her with a gloved hand through his dark hair, her fingers skimming his scalp. He muttered his approval and shifted, burying the side of his face into his pillow, inhaling deeply through his nose in a way that sounded almost like a snore.

"Go to sleep, Archie. You drank too much."

He stirred again. His eyes blinking open became a glint of blue in the yellow lamplight, which was followed by flash of teeth as he recognized her blurry outline. He smiled lazily.

"Shelly..."

Archie tried to sit up. He couldn't manage it—too woozy—and when Shelly pressed a palm to his broad chest he surrendered, his head falling back against the pillow, trapping a laugh in the back of his throat as the world above him spun. Shelly laughed quietly too, and then followed him down, shifting so that she could bend over him, her long hair cascading over them both like sheets of red rain. She teased him gently, knowing it wouldn't lead anywhere tonight—simply enjoying the fun of making him squirm, his breath hitching when she pulled aside the collar of his low-cut shirt to kiss his neck. When she felt his hand brush her hair, she explored further, catching the silver chain lying across his throat in her teeth for just long enough to give it a playful tug.

"Heheh..."

His hand in her hair came down, combing fingers through the long strands before stroking the side of her face more clumsily than usual. Then his arm fell back onto the bed, and his eyes closed. When he forced them open once more, Shelly tilted his chin up with one finger, making him grin.

"Shelly..."

Again she pressed her splayed palm to his chest, leaning in to pin him to the sheets with easy kisses that made him laugh softly in between, filling the small room with a low, pleasant rumble. When Shelly pulled away from him, she licked the taste of moonshine off of the inside of her cheek.

"Sleep," she said—then remembered herself and added, with teasing sincerity, "Sir."

"Nngh..."

In amusement, she watched him visibly lose the battle with alcohol and exhaustion, his breathing getting deeper and steadier, his whole body relaxing when she touched his hair once more. On impulse she pulled off her glove, tracing a lone fingernail across his hairline before scratching his scalp with practiced finesse. That was the secret weapon, and final straw. Within half a minute he had completely melted into the sheets.

At one point he tried to say something, but Shelly couldn't make out the words, and chuckled as she kept scratching slowly, tranquilizing him. Drunk or sober, he was often like putty for her in private, and she fully appreciated how much of a compliment that was. Archie was a not a man who handed someone else the reins without a damn good reason.

His chest rose and fell steadily, his deep exhalations sometimes tapering off into sighs; Shelly studied him. Of course, he was her leader, and she respected him dutifully for it—but leaderliness wasn't really a quality he could exude while on the verge of passing out, drunk and pantless. She wanted to laugh, even: at the way his short dark hair had mussed, at the stubble beginning to show around his neatly trimmed mustache and beard, and especially at how his shirt had bunched up around him—that stupid, stupid shirt, collared but cut low to show off the muscles he kept sculpted out of pure vanity. (Not, of course, that Shelly had any objection to that.)

"...Shelly..."

She stopped scratching; Archie's eyes stayed closed.

"Yes?"

"...you should stay..."

"Mmm...no, thank you. You're too tired to fuck."

Archie grumbled in vague displeasure, then buried his face in the deflated pillow again, inhaling deeply. Shelly never stayed the whole night, and she knew he knew it; she supposed that in his current state he simply didn't remember how pointless it was to ask. She placated him with a kiss on the forehead, eliciting a grunt that tapered into a sigh as he started to drift off.

Shelly spared the rest of the familiar room a look. As always, it was clearly the habitat of a man with plans too big for the triviality of tidiness, the low-level chaos of everything being near, but not quite in, its proper place. Taking it all in brought to mind the first evening she'd been invited here—if one could call kissing longer and harder and hotter than they'd planned an _invitation,_ playful laughter and hands on her hips, grabbing his collar and yanking him close so she could taunt him with insubordinate foreplay. But she hadn't slept the whole night in his bed, as a matter of pride, and by now she refused it out of habit. At this point the two of them were an open secret (probably, at least—no one had been stupid enough to ask her directly), but the last thing Shelly wanted was for anyone to think that Archie had originally promoted her for any reason other than her excellence.

Shelly looked down, watching Archie snore gently beside her on the narrow bunk. What this was, she still had no idea. It was unwise to mix business and pleasure, but Team Aqua was both—was everything—was her whole world, now, so that she remembered the years before (when her life had not been her own) mostly with disdain. And even though her natural wariness had by no means approved of letting this happen, Shelly had found other bits of her that did, voices usually silenced that bubbled up to whisper in her ear in times and places like this. Little ripples, almost, beneath the hard glassy surface inside her.

Archie stirred in his sleep, his shirt rustling against the sheets that spilled off the side of the bed. Shelly tossed her head absently and used both hands to pull back her voluminous hair, brushing it out of her eyes.

If she was honest with herself—and she tried to be—Shelly sometimes sensed that her feelings for him were running unacceptably deep now, like a trickle of water that, while small, had gone on so long and so steadily that it had begun to carve a channel in the bed of granite along which it flowed. There was danger in that, and Shelly knew it well enough to have set her own boundaries the first night they'd kissed...but a nagging warmth in the pit of her stomach as she watched him sleep warned her that perhaps those boundaries hadn't been enough. Or they had been, but something had happened to weaken them, something she could neither see nor touch nor control—only vaguely feel, stirring, when she gazed at him long enough.

Even unconscious, he was smiling. That was his default expression: a smirk or a smile or a wide and wicked grin, excitement blazing in his face as he praised the future they were fighting to build themselves. Archie lived in that future, and in the present; his past did not weigh him down. Shelly knew little about it—prying was not in her nature—but it still impressed her that Archie could hurl himself forward as recklessly as he did; fear and doubt were not in his vocabulary, except perhaps as strange illnesses that other people sometimes came down with. And while his arrogance was genuine, it did not grate on her like most people's. He was driven and aggressive, to be sure, but not in a way that blinded him to life's pleasures.

Ripples...

Shelly realized she had started touching him again—absently, her gloveless hand tracing his beard with her knuckles, following his jawline. If he felt it in his sleep, he didn't show it, and Shelly smiled faintly as she ran her thumb behind his ear, her eyes half-lidded. She hadn't realized it, but she was tired, too. It had been a long week, and there was work enough waiting for them both tomorrow, as always. Until they found Kyogre, that work would never cease. But at the moment, for some reason, Shelly didn't feel the weight of it in the back of her mind. Something to do with the smile still playing around the corners of his mouth, even in sleep.

She stifled a yawn, then blinked furiously and leaned forward, finally letting go of him so she could rest her elbows on her knees, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Hm. Funny, that he was the one to blame for all the work she had to do, and yet she only found herself able to let go of the weight of work when she was with him, alone. She had always been strong-willed, and authority suited her, yet it exhausted her, too, if she didn't acknowledge the endless grind of it. But Archie never seemed to get burned out, no matter how many carefully-planned missions turned out to be dead ends. His roaring laugh punctuated declarations that would have sounded comical in their grandiosity if they came from anyone else's mouth, and no matter how fruitless the day had been, the fierce joy of his hubris was always enough to reassure her. If they hadn't triumphed today, well, they certainly would tomorrow. They were more than clever and determined and ambitious enough. It was only a matter of time.

Shelly yawned again, glancing at the clock on the wall, and pressed the heel of her hand into her eyebrow as she realized how late it really was. Or technically, how early. Roll call was at seven, and it would never do for the tactical commander, of all people, to be late for it. She gathered herself, then stood up slowly, the bunk squeaking as her weight left it.

Archie did not stir, and she gazed down at him for a long moment, watching him snore. Another smile crossed her lips—thin, like her usual smirk, but her scarlet eyes didn't have quite enough glitter in them for that. When Archie gave a particularly hard snore, she almost laughed aloud.

This was nothing serious, she told herself. Trust could be fatal, and was almost always foolish, but this was—well, this was permissible, somehow. She was in control of it, and it wasn't as if she cared for him, not really, not in a spineless way—nothing half so dangerous as that. This was just...ripples. Little ripples on the surface of the water, silent and unassuming. That was all.

"Sleep well, sir."

She crossed the room and found the light switch without looking, clicking it off, leaving her leader in darkness. Her long red hair swayed as she slipped out the door.


End file.
